


A Tear Not Easily Mended

by underlanderfromtheoverland



Series: Until The Whole World Falls Apart [2]
Category: Homestuck, Time's Apprentice - Fandom
Genre: Hell yes I finally finished the sequel, IT'S THE TRAUMA, Mythology - Freeform, Time's Apprentice, coding sucks, mental breakdowns, thank u jonaya for getting the code to work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-03
Updated: 2021-02-03
Packaged: 2021-03-14 10:13:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29169387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/underlanderfromtheoverland/pseuds/underlanderfromtheoverland
Summary: Time flowed differently when the God of Time bestowed his favor on you, but it flows even more differently when you are a God of Time. God of Fate. God of Destruction.~~~Never truly forgotten
Series: Until The Whole World Falls Apart [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2141643
Kudos: 4





	A Tear Not Easily Mended

**Author's Note:**

  * For [articulatelyComposed](https://archiveofourown.org/users/articulatelyComposed/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Until the Whole World Falls Apart](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21379909) by [underlanderfromtheoverland](https://archiveofourown.org/users/underlanderfromtheoverland/pseuds/underlanderfromtheoverland). 



Time flowed differently when the God of Time bestowed his favor on you, but it flows even more differently when you _are_ a God of Time. God of Fate. God of Destruction. 

No, that’s too simplistic. Time is more than that. 

Time is entropy, but it’s also the grasping of order within that chaos.  
Time is ambiguity, insofar as it describes the hazy cloud of possibility surrounding each universe.  
Time is progression, not towards good or towards evil, but towards _new_.  
Time is the heartbeat of a universe, bringing possibility and second chances from the past and the future to the present.  
Time is division and choices and infinite potential.  
Time is the mechanism by which fate completes its plans- completes _Her_ plans.  
Time is a story, but so is every other aspect of a universe. In a way, the universe _itself_ is a story, and the Gods its storytellers.

In every story, there is truth and there is falsehood, for words cannot capture the nature of reality anymore than cupped hands can hold an ocean. Still, the universe desires to be told, and more importantly, it desires to be heard. There is a spark of divinity in every story told and every story listened to, but most mortals cannot access more than a glimpse of this, even with psychic powers gifting them more knowledge than a mortal should have. Holding that truth is the role of the Gods: to tell and hear and _be_ the messy story of a universe and its neighborhood of diverging timelines that spread like roots into the fertile void.

  
For in each branch, there is deceit, and in each branch, there is truth. 

For in each branch, there is something to be learned, and in each branch, something to be made.

  
For in each branch, there is hope, and in each branch, there is despair. 

For in each branch, there is something to be won, and in each branch, there is something to be lost.

For the universe is alive, and it is evolving.  
~~~

Long after most of the Gods depart back to their reams of sunbaked seas and shaded palaces and primordial possibility from which they mold their homes, Theresa remains behind. She sits on the edge of a cliff that plunges deep into a gorge, her legs dangling over the depths. Her heels scrape the stone.

A faint crackle of the Divine sparks down her arms. She knows it will never leave this place. The power has embedded itself into the very fabric of reality. It’s woven itself into the weft and sinks into the fibers until the only way to extract it would be to excise the design from the tapestry altogether. She knows she could do that. It would be so easy to just reach into the center of reality itself and wipe this planet from the stars. She could start over elsewhere, on a planet that doesn’t bear the scars of tyranny and battle, on a planet she doesn’t have to mend and stitch together from scraps. She won’t, though. She couldn’t. Not without breaking every promise she made to herself, and not without dishonoring the pain and dignity of those who suffered and fought for a better world.

This place will heal, and in time, become a place of great significance, as any other Gods-Touched place must. First, though, it must settle. The wounds to the surface of the planet and the tears on the fabric of reality must slowly mend themselves. 

In the distance, a lazy ooze of magma meanders across the plains and sends up plumes of steam where it runs into the sea. Raging fires consume the remnants of forests miles in the distance. She can just make out the remnants of the Imperial Palace at the edge of the razed battlefield. There is no sign of the city that once stood between here and there. 

“Figures,” she mutters, watching one of the palace’s many spires give way and crumble. She can almost imagine the resonance of the crash rattling her chest. 

“What figures?”

Theresa jumps and gasps in short gulp of air that leaves her coughing black soot. She doesn’t need to breathe, but the habit is hard to break, and airborne bits of burnt stone still aren’t a pleasant thing to inhale.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you.” The God of Love and Loyalty smiles sadly down at Theresa. Her voice is soft and perpetually tinged with something bittersweet, like nostalgia for a place that never existed. It’s a voice made for lullabies and whispered promises. It’s a voice for gentler moments than this.

“It’s fine,” Theresa says, then turns away again. The sun just barely kisses the horizon over the sea and paints the sky in shades of red and orange.

“May I join you?” The God of Love asks. 

“Sure.” Theresa shrugs. 

The God of Love lowers herself onto the cliffside next to Theresa with all the grace of a ballet dancer. For a few minutes, neither of them say anything. Out of the corner of her eye, Theresa watches The God of Love fiddle with her hair. She carefully takes it down from the small puff she’d pulled it back into for the battle and rearranges her curls to a more typical soft-edged cloud around her face. 

When Theresa had first met The God of Love, she’d been perched on a cliff’s edge, starting down at a sea as green as emeralds as though the glints of sunlight on its surface held more depth than the endless expanse below. Maybe they had. The landscape they both stared across now certainly doesn’t.

When the silence finally breaks, it’s the God of Love who speaks. “Theresa.” 

Theresa turns just barely enough to look at her. 

“You didn’t answer my question.” The God of Love’s voice is gentle but unyielding, and Theresa knows her well enough to realize she won’t stop until she gets an answer. 

“Just…” Theresa looks back to the silhouette of the palatial ruins. “Out of all the things that got destroyed, _that_ had to be the one thing that…” She trails off. She’d wants to say something about it being the one thing that remained standing, but that isn’t really it. 

“The one thing that…” The God of Love prompts. 

Theresa shakes her head. “I don’t even really know where I was going with that. It’s just that everything’s destroyed completely except for _that_ , and…”

“And you don’t know how to feel about it?”

“Exactly!” Theresa throws her hands into the air and lets the momentum carry her backwards. Her head knocks against the stone, and only a couple of hours ago, that would have hurt, but apparently Gods feel less pain, too. Great, another thing to get used to. No wonder they’re so fucked up. At least now that she’s laying down, she can’t stare at the palace. Instead, she sees the stars. And, a moment later, she sees The God of Love’s face just barely peeking into view. Her dark eyes are so sad, but they always are. Theresa never dared to ask why. Maybe she should. Maybe she will, but not now.

“Would you like to talk about it?” She offers. 

“I thought that’s what we were doing.” Theresa folds her arms under her head because while a stone pillow might not _hurt_ , it’s not exactly comfortable either. The God of Love nods slightly, as if to say ‘I see your point’, but she doesn’t speak. A few moments pass. Theresa is the one who finally breaks the silence, and her voice is soft and small for once. 

“It’s done now,” she says. “He’s gone, and I’m here, and I’m _a God_ and I know what I want to do but I don’t know how to do it, and then there’s the Empress’s fucking palace, sitting there, like it’s taunting me and I just feel so-“ she cuts herself off with a frustrated noise. 

“So...?” The God of Love echoes. 

“So-” Theresa pauses and scrubs at her face with the palms of her hands. “So-“

  
“Angry!” 

Theresa presses the heels of her palms into her eyes until they ache and spots of color appear in the darkness. “No, not angry. Furious. I’m… I don’t know if I’ve ever felt this angry before, and I don’t know if that’s because becoming a god changed me somehow, or if everything he did broke me, or-” Theresa’s breath shudders for a moment. “-or if it’s just me.”

The God of Love purses her lips and nods once. “This is a lot. It could easily be overwhelming. You’ve had to endure so much only to have such a responsibility handed to you so suddenly. It’s not surprising that you’re angry about what’s happened to you.“

“I’m not angry for me.” Theresa turns towards the God of Loyalty, who at least has the decency to look taken aback. All the fucked up, overwhelming emotions clawing at the inside of Theresa’s chest just tangle themselves up even tighter, and the fact that she can’t even pick apart her own feelings just makes everything worse.

“I don’t…”

“That’s exactly it. You don’t. You didn’t. You- all of you-“ Theresa slams her hands against the ground and shoves herself upright. “None of you did.”

The God of Loyalty looks more wounded and confused than Theresa has ever seen. It’s a far cry from her normal composure, and a twinge of guilt joins the maelstrom. 

“None of us did… what?”

“Anything!” Theresa slams her hand into the ground again and feels the stone crack. She yanks her hand back with a hiss as something stabs her. A stone shard has lodged itself right in the big palm crease just under her pinky. She lets out a loud, almost feral sound somewhere between a groan and a scream, yanks the coin sized shard from her hand, and throws it down into the ravine. 

“You could have stopped him. You could have done something- anything- before he did any of this. You could have saved billions of lives, and saved even more from having terrible, fucked up lives, but you didn’t. You just played in your treehouses and sailed on your boats and stared at your oceans for who knows how long…“ 

She knew. Seventeen billion, four hundred and two million, nine hundred and eighty one thousand, one hundred and forty seven years, three months, ten days, seven hours, and twenty one seconds. When she spoke again, it was quieter- still angry, but… quieter. 

“You could have stopped him,” she says again. “You could have stopped him before he killed all those people. Before he made me-“ For a second, she just sits there, almost trembling. Then slowly, The God of Love wraps her arms around her and pulls her close. 

“Why didn’t you do anything?” she asks, hating herself for how whiny and childish she sounds. She’s an adult. She’s a God. She shouldn’t be throwing tantrums like this.

“You think we didn’t try?” The God of Love asks. Theresa’s silence is her answer. “Theresa… We did. Not us, but other usses. He was the god of fate. He just ended those timelines before we could change anything.”

Somewhere deep inside her, Theresa knows this is true the same way she knows the exact number of seconds that had passed since the God of Love embraced her. Knowing it’s true doesn’t make her feel any better. 

Theresa takes a shuddering breath that makes her lungs sting with ash again. “I hate this.”

“I’m sorry,” the God of Loyalty says.

Waves crash against the distant shoreline as the last of the sun dips below it. The tide’s going out, carrying with it a lot of the ash. There’s not quite a defined line, but the newly exposed sand is less dark, less contaminated. Something tells her this should be poignant, but she’s too tired to think of how or why. 

“I shouldn’t have yelled at you.”

“It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not. None of this is. He’s gone, but everything he fucked up is still here, and I’m still angry. I’m so angry I don’t even know how to say it. He ruined everything just because he could, and people fell for it. Everyone fell for his bullshit, and what’s worse is that I knew. I knew what he was doing, and I still went along with it. I chose to do this.”

The God of Love says nothing, but she does pull her closer.

“This is my fault.”

“No, it’s not.”

That’s another thing that her new grasp on Fate told her was true, but once again, it does nothing to change the way she feels. 

“Is it bad that I just want to punch something?”

“Well you did already punch the ground, in a way.”

A choked laugh slips out before Theresa can hold it back. “I slapped it,” she protests weakly. “That’s not the same.” Theresa carefully pulls back from the hug, and the God of Love lets her arms drop. 

“Would you like to stay here a while longer, or would you like to go back?” the God of Loyalty asks.

“I…” Theresa looks over the battlefield again as the last of the sun dips below the horizon. Her eyes land on the palace in the distance. “I want to go there. And I want to punch things.”

The God of Love pauses for a second, then gives a conceding nod. “Okay,” The God of Love says as she takes the God of Time’s hand. “Let’s go.”

Between blinks, they’re sitting in the rubble-strewn courtyard. Theresa can tell it was once a beautiful place, barring the ostentatious mosaics and statues of several generations of pink-eyed empresses. It was all built on the backs of slaves. It all needs to come down. 

Theresa may not have been able to directly confront the people responsible for the evils she witnessed, but she can absolutely punch in the face of every single statue until it’s less of a head and more of a deflated volleyball. When that just barely makes a dent in her anger, she moves on to the architecture, which crumbles and cracks under her fingertips. Part of it, she knows, is her new godly strength, but part of it is Time. Entropy gathers beneath her palms and the masonry crumbles under the weight of centuries in just seconds. 

She is the God of Destruction. The God of Wrath. The God of Fucking This Shit Up Until There’s Literally Not a Gods Damned Trace of It Left. She is…

Tired. 

The palace is nothing but precariously stacked stone and vague impressions in the dirt by the time she’s done. She doesn’t feel any better, though. She just feels… hollow. The God of Loyalty joins her where the courtyard once was and rests her hand on Theresa’s shoulder. It’s warm and soft and even that small gesture of comfort makes Theresa’s throat ache with unshed tears. 

“Does it get easier?”

The God of Loyalty pauses a moment, then squeezes her shoulder gently. “No. Not really. It’s never easy, but I found ways to cope. Not all of them were wonderful in hindsight, but… it becomes less painful. Maybe I’ve just become numb to it.”

“I don’t want to become numb to it. I don’t…” Theresa pauses and glances over at the God of Love. Her warm brown skin is paled by a thin coating of the stone dust Theresa made in her rampage. Theresa opens her mouth to speak again, but beyond the God of Love, something catches her eye. 

A building. No, a barracks of some sort. Something cold clenches in her stomach as she realizes what it is. Slave quarters. “I don’t want to forget why I did any of this in the first place,” Theresa says quietly, her eyes still locked on that half-fallen building. How many died there, worked to death by the very system she’d once fought so hard against, then indirectly for?

“Theresa.” The God of Love put a hand on the God of Time’s cheek and looked her in the eye. “You won’t. And you’ve made sure that we won’t either. Not again. Not this time.”

The God of Time nodded. “Okay,” she said, almost too quietly to hear. “Okay,” she repeated, this time with a bit more strength behind it. "I'm ready." 

  
“Sad!”

Theresa blinks hard, clearing away tears that just barely threatened to well up in her eyes. She’s just… so tired. So frustrated. Yes, they won, but that can’t undo everything that happened. She’d thought she’d made peace with this a long time ago, but apparently not. 

“And I hurt people,” she added. “I was literally the one to cause all of this. I spent so long manipulating and being manipulated and _I killed people_. I killed so many fucking people, and it’s not like I can say ‘well they were soldiers, they knew what might happen’ because they fucking _weren’t_.” 

Theresa turns over onto her side and stares towards the sea. She doesn’t deserve to see the stars. “And now… I’m making their deaths all about me and I feel so fucking selfish and I’m so scared that I’m going to turn into _Him_ …”

Theresa takes a shuddering breath that makes her lungs sting with ash again. “I hate this.”

The God of Love makes a sympathetic sound and rests her hand on Theresa’s shoulder. It’s warm and soft and even that small gesture of comfort makes Theresa’s throat ache with unshed tears. 

“It’s hard,” The God of Love says. “This role, how everything changes… it’s hard.”

“Does it get easier?”

The God of Loyalty pauses a moment, then squeezes her shoulder gently. “No. Not really. It’s never easy, but I found ways to cope. Not all of them were wonderful in hindsight, but… it becomes less painful. Maybe I’ve just become numb to it.”

“Great.” Theresa’s voice is low and bitter. 

Waves crash against the distant shoreline as the last of the sun dips below it. The tide’s going out, carrying with it a lot of the ash. There’s not quite a defined line, but the newly exposed sand is less dark, less contaminated. Something tells her this should be poignant, but she’s too tired to think of how or why. Instead, a longing begins to build in her chest- one that she’d repressed for so many centuries. It didn’t make any sense, and that just made it all the more distressing. 

“I want to go home.”

Gods, she feels like such a baby, but she wants to go _home_. She wants this to have all been a nightmare. She wants to wake up in her apartment, turn on her sputtery coffee machine that she should probably replace, and talk to her mom about this weird and upsetting dream, but literally all of those things are gone. Her apartment had been cleared out two months after she’d been declared missing, presumed dead, and the building had been torn down to make way for some cerulean and cobalt townhouses two decades later. The coffee machine had probably gone in the trash, and her mom… 

Tears begin to well in her eyes again, and this time, she doesn’t bother blinking them away.

“I know,” The God of Love half-whispers.

“I just. I don’t want to do this, and I want to go home.” This time, Theresa’s voice cracks. A half-swallowed sob makes her shoulders shake, but The God of Love’s hand just moves with her.

“I know,” she repeats.

“I-“ The rest of Theresa’s words are lost in a choked sob as her face crumples and she curls her knees up to her chest. She’s cried countless times since the night of Mara’s death, but never like this, never a deep, chest-aching sob that shakes her whole body and claws at her throat like fire on the way out. 

The God of Love lets out a soft sigh and runs her palm down Theresa’s arm. She doesn’t say anything this time, but she doesn’t leave either. She just stays there, hand on Theresa’s shoulder, until she cries herself out in the light of the rising sun. 

“I’m sorry,” Theresa chokes out. Tears still run down her face, but the sobs have at least died down to hiccups. “You didn’t have to stay out here with me.”

“No,” the God of Love agrees. “But I wanted to. Would you like to stay here a while longer, or would you like to go back?”

Theresa takes a deep, shuddering breath and sits upright. Gods, she aches. Apparently, Gods can feel more pain than she realized. “I don’t want to stay here, but I don’t want to go back to his space either.”

“You’re always welcome in my realm, if you want, but… it would feel wrong to not point out that it’s no longer his realm. It was always the realm of the God of Time, and… well, that’s you, now. It’s your realm.”

“Great, now I own an awful green office to go with my awful green clothes.” Theresa’s shoulders shake again, but this time, it’s a half-swallowed laugh. She doesn’t really know why she laughed, but hey, it was a thing that happened anyway. 

The God of Love smiles one of her odd smiles at Theresa. There’s pity in there, but not a condescending type. It’s a type of pity that says ‘I know what this is like, and I wouldn’t have wished it on anyone’. There’s sadness, too, and Theresa is fairly sure she knows exactly where that’s coming from. 

Mostly, though, as is fitting for her title, there is love, and that realization makes Theresa feel like a black hole has taken up residence between her lungs.

Luckily, the God of Love speaks before Theresa has to. 

“Well, like I said, it’s yours now. It shapes itself to your desires. And-“ The God of Love offers her hand to Theresa. “Something tells me you could use the catharsis of erasing his mark from the Divine Plane. It might help.”

Theresa knows she’s right, but there’s no spark of vindictive glee or anything. It feels more like resignation, or maybe determination. Words can’t quite capture any of these messy feelings, but it just feels… right, like it’s the next step towards fixing this. 

“Okay,” The God of Time says as she takes The God of Love’s hand. “Let’s go.”

Between blinks, they’re back in the God of Time’s office, sitting on the lime green rug in front of her former employer’s equally garish desk. The overwhelming _green_ of it all makes Theresa’s eyes ache, but almost before she can even register that fact, it melts away into a blank whiteness that stretches infinitely in all directions in all dimensions. 

Somehow, within this blankness, something churns and fizzles. It crackles like the divine magic staining the battlefield, but that is mere half-erased marks compared to the angry churning of the potentiality of eternity contained within this nothingness.

It makes Theresa’s eyes ache more than the office did. 

“What would you like for your realm?” The God of Love asks. Her voice somehow sounds both entirely muffled and like it’s echoing from all directions at once. 

“I don’t know,” Theresa says, and her voice sounds the same. 

What does a God need to be a God? Well, that depends on what the God wants to do, right? There are so many things Theresa wants to do, but her thoughts won’t settle enough for her to corral them into some semblance of order. Up until now, she’d only had a single-minded focus on the completion of her plan, but now, without that focus, her mind sparks and fizzles in a way that makes her feel like she probably understands 204 and his uncooperative brain a bit more than she did a moment ago. 

She wants a better world. 

One where no one is killed for being different. 

One where people can pick their own destinies instead of having them decided by the genetic lottery. 

One without an empress to lord power over everyone else.

She wants… safety. 

She wants home. The bedroom her predecessor had given her had never felt like hers, even after all those centuries. She was always a visitor borrowing Mara’s space. Now, she wants somewhere that’s hers without throwing away those memories. 

She wants warmth.

She wants light.

She wants whatever the exact opposite of lime green is.

Theresa opens her eyes to a massive cavern with a stained glass ceiling a hundred feet up that casts bright splashes of color down to the floor below. Like the realm of her predecessor, there are bookshelves, but hers are carved directly into the opalescent walls in a ring around nearly the entire ground floor. There is no central desk here- no place from which to sit and impose her will. Instead, there are armchairs and loveseats and sofas around coffee tables, and there is a long, stately table in the center of the room with dozens of chairs tucked neatly under it.

Archways in the gaps between shelves open into large staircases that run within the walls, leading higher and deeper into The God of Time’s new realm. Balconies dot the walls higher up, and pale vines with delicate flowers in nearly every color drape from the railings almost to the floor. 

“Oh,” The God of Time breathes. A small, almost disbelieving laugh escapes her. “A library. I thought I was done with studying.” 

“Theresa,” The God of Love says quietly, and The God of Time turns to look. One of the archways- the largest one- is open to the outside. It’s not the same ‘outside’ that shines through the skylight. Instead, it opens to the top of a cliff overlooking a calm sea. Now that she’s paying attention, the God of Time can just barely feel the faint sea breeze. 

On the horizon, she can just barely see the sails of ships.

“Oh,” The God of Time repeats. A slow smile creeps across her face. “I see.”

Never again will the gods be cut off from the world. Soon enough, one of those ships will come across Theresa’s small island, and there they will find a god. She will not rule them, but she will guide them. She will share her story, and the story of all those who came before her to build the path upon which she walks. Their stories will live forever here, in books and in The God of Fate herself. 

Never truly gone.

Never truly forgotten.

~~~

And tucked away, deep within the winding halls of The God of Time’s realm, is a small, green bedroom with a neatly made bed and a wardrobe full of green dresses. Sitting upon the pillow is a gleaming knife.

 _Never truly forgotten_.


End file.
